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Transcript 111D — Does God Speak to Us in Dreams?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes. I'm a Sunday School teacher, and I have a girl in my class, a teenager, and she wanted to know why she keeps having dreams and they keep coming true. And I didn't know what to tell her.
HC: The question is, What do we do when we know somebody, or this is happening in our own life, that we have dreams and they start coming true? This is a fairly serious business, because it means that we have begun to listen to those dreams as being some kind of a revelation from God. We have that dream, and we think about it and we pay a lot of attention to it. And we really memorize it in our mind, so that later on, when it appears to come true, then we are convinced that it must have been from God.
Actually, the Bible teaches that there is only one source of divine truth, and that is the Bible. If we add anything to the words of this book, God will add to us the plagues written therein. Now we have an enemy whose name is Satan. And he desperately tries to snare us away from the Word of God. And so he may begin to plague us, with dreams or with visions or with whatever, in order to try to get us to listen to something else besides the Word of God.
Or we may be doing this in our own minds. We all dream. Dreams are as common as grass. We would not be healthy unless we dreamed. And it may be that we dream, and just the fact that we are listening so carefully and looking for these things (Will they begin to take place in the future?), causes us to begin to look upon this as the Word of God. And in that sense we are worshipping other gods.
Whether it's from Satan or whether it's out of our own mind, it really doesn't make any difference. We are not to listen to that. And if she will go to the Lord and ask forgiveness, if she will cry out for His mercy, "Oh Lord, forgive me, that I would ever think about a dream as being some divine message. Forgive me for not listening only to the Word of God," and if she'll level with the Lord and mean business with Him, so that Christ is her Savior and Lord, then she's not going to have this happen anymore, that things would be foretold so that they would come true. E.S.P., dreams, anything at all that appears to come true is of an occult world that is alien to God.
CALLER: When she told me that when she goes to bed at night and has these dreams, they come true, I began to wonder. I'll have her pray then, and ask the Lord to forgive her for this?
HC: Yes. And if she has a dream, pay no attention to it. We dream every night. Sometimes we remember the dream more vividly than others. A lot of times we don't remember the dream at all, and we think we haven't dreamed. But we dream every night. But we are not to pay any attention to the dream.
You will find that if you are troubled about something, you might have a nightmare. You dreams relate to perhaps a flashing thought during the day, some TV program you watched, or it may relate to just a phrase that somebody uttered. But if we begin to pay attention to the dream, and begin to think, "Maybe God was trying to tell me something," then you're walking into trouble. Then you're opening the door to Satan, to allow him to begin to prey on you. This is the opening he wants. He likes nothing better than that we look for divine truth from a source outside of the Bible, because then he can come with messages in one occult way or another. And if we're identified with the Bible, he'll try to make his messages sound exactly like the Bible, so we get accustomed to this procedure. And then gradually he will woo us and bring us additional information slightly different from the Bible. And in that way we'll no longer be able to interpret the Bible accurately. And so he'll have us.
CALLER: I hope I don't frighten her with this, or cause the pastor to get angry with me. I had spoken to him, and he said, "Oh yes, I've had premonitions." He said, "Don't worry about it. It's nothing. It isn't Satan." He's not much on Satan. But I knew if I asked you, I'd get the right answer. So whether or not he gets angry with me, I'll tell her what you said.
HC: Well, this is what I would recommend. And you can do it very gently. You can just tell her, "Now there is an occult world." But really start out with Revelation 22:18, where God declares that we are not to add anything to the words of this book. The Bible alone is the divine Word of God.
And then emphasize to her, "Now look. To dream is as natural as anything. Everybody dreams. But what we do with that dream, there is where the problem lies. And so don't pay any attention. And ask the Lord for forgiveness, that you might never again pay any attention to those dreams."
CALLER: All right. Well, thank you so much. Good evening.
HC: Thank you. Good night.